Tweet

After a spinal injury ended his career behind the pass, Michael White spent years watching professional kitchens struggle with the same paper-based systems he’d worked under. Chef-Ops-Pro is his answer.

Michael White spent the better part of his career in professional kitchens. Then a car accident changed everything.

The consequences didn’t appear immediately. It was years later that the full impact became clear — two damaged discs at L4 and L5 of his spine, leaving him without the physical mobility that kitchen life demands. By 2011, after years of progressively moving into management roles as his condition worsened, he left the industry he had built his career in.

“You don’t just walk away from kitchens,” says White. “That environment gets into you. The pace, the pressure, the standards you hold yourself to. I didn’t stop thinking like a chef — I just couldn’t stand in one anymore.”

What stayed with him, alongside the identity of the industry, was the frustration of how it was run. Temperature logs on clipboards. Compliance records in folders that went missing before inspections. Staff training documented on paper that nobody could find when an EHO officer walked through the door. The same inefficiencies, year after year, in an industry that had digitalised almost everything except its back-of-house operations.

While a number of platforms exist that serve portions of this problem — some focused on allergen management, others on temperature logging or HACCP checklists — operators wanting full coverage have typically had to stack multiple disconnected tools. The result is software that cannot cross-reference data between modules, creating the same fragmented picture that paper systems produced, just in digital form.

Chef-Ops-Pro is the platform White built to fix that.

Launched in June 2026, Chef-Ops-Pro brings together EHO compliance reporting, temperature logging, blast chill records, HACCP checklists, staff training documentation, rota management, food cost tracking, and procurement into a single cloud-based platform — accessible on any device, from any location. Because every module sits within the same platform, data is connected across the operation — giving kitchen managers and operators a complete picture rather than a collection of separate records.

“Every other part of a restaurant operation has been modernised,” says White. “Reservations, payments, ordering, marketing — all digital. But the kitchen compliance folder is still sitting on a shelf next to the pass, full of paper that nobody can read and records that go back three weeks at best. That’s the gap I built Chef-Ops-Pro to close.”

The platform is designed to serve the full range of UK food businesses — independent restaurants, pub kitchens, hotel F&B operations, care home kitchens, contract caterers, school canteens, and mobile catering operations. Pricing starts at £40 per month for single-site operators, with multi-site pricing from £25 per property per month.

For White, the launch is both a business and something more personal — a way back into an industry he never really left.

“I built this for the kitchen managers and head chefs who are doing everything right but still spending Sunday night worrying about what an inspector might find on Monday morning. That used to be me. It doesn’t have to be anyone.”

A free trial is available at www.chef-ops-pro.com